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SOA Worst Practices Volume II: A Look At Governance
SOA Worst Practices, Volume II: A Look at Governance, as the title suggests, is the follow-on white paper to SOA Worst Practices, Volume I: a collection, of dubious––and sometimes disastrous ––case studies of service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations. Each scenario describes and analyzes the critical SOA errors and lessons learned, and then a prescription is revealed to stimulate discussion and corrective possibilities.
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A Governance Focus
The first "SOA Worst Practices" white paper from Progress Software focused on tactical and strategic aspects of implementing service-oriented architectures: employing SOAP standards, the limits of XML firewalls, Web-services reuse, and so on. This paper, by contrast, will zero in on the worst practices of organizations that attempted—or attempted to avoid—SOA governance and the contrasting SOA best practice.
SOA Juggernaut
SOA fever is reaching peak levels in the IT industry, and in the IT-industry media: there's simply no escaping it as company after company seeks to squeeze competitive advantage from its information infrastructure. Now, even the major packaged-application vendors are delivering built-in Web services with their applications—forcing IT organizations that would otherwise have wished to put SOA on the back burner to face the prospects of their SOA enterprise initiatives today. For these organizations, a key question arises: how should you manage and govern these new services as they are being deployed on your network?
Terms of Confusion
While there is a lot of excitement surrounding SOA technology, there is still great confusion over the terms used to describe what is included in SOA. A glance at Google as of this writing shows that SOA governance produces millions of hits, while Web services management returns 100s of millions of hits. Given the millions of pages of content published on the Internet, coupled with the sense of relative novelty associated with the subject, it’s no wonder different suppliers, service providers, analysts, members of the press and IT managers promote their own, often unique, definitions of the concept. With the prevailing confusion around the term "governance," therefore, it's very easy for people who think they are doing the same thing––addressing governance––to be moving, in reality, in opposite directions.
The Seven Worst Practices—and Their Remedies
The case studies in this paper tell the cautionary tales of several organizations whose not-so-best laid SOA governance plans went awry and the best practices they should have followed:
- SOA change management is essential to effective SOA governance and ROI In Governance, as a Process, Can Be "Checked at the Gates,", one company learned this lesson when its developers tried to build governance into the services, leaving no mechanism for accommodating change.
- SOA CRM — using an SOA to enhance the customer experience by improving service levels—is far less costly than the solution for meeting SLAs described in We’ll Do Anything for Our Best Customers: Even Duplicate Our Data Center: duplicating computing resources.
- Coordinating SOA design initiatives is necessary for effective SOA governance. Divide and Conquer: Approaching Security, Management and Governance Separately shows how incomplete SOA policies and business problems arise when a .company separates its SOA security, SOA management, and SOA governance teams.
- Active SOA compliance is mandatory to avoid business loss, litigation, and financial penalties. As Long as I Don’t Know about It, Compliance Doesn’t Matter tells the tale of how. one company suffered the consequences when it waited to update its compliance policies.
- SOA authorization for Web services built into enterprise applications is essential to avoid rogue services and related SOA performance problems. No Worries: We Know Who’s Using the Web Services that Come with Our App proves that unauthorized users will be quick to discover and use Web services.
- An SOA center — a forum where IT and business specialists can meet—will help to promote SOA acceptance and Web services reuse. In Hey, This is a Really Cool Registry; Our Web Services Designers Will Love It, this was the lesson learned by one company when its IT department failed to consult business management/
- A central SOA organization is necessary for creating a comprehensive SOA governance solution. No Thanks: We Have Our Own Standards and Processes Here tells the story of one diversified company in which each IT unit head created an independent SOA implementation—leading to replicated work and, more important, increased risk of violating government regulations and business policies.
